She doesn't even know the name of the song

My mother is in our house right now using my computer to do some schoolwork (she teaches community college) and she has been humming non-stop for the last two hours. She literally stops humming long enough to mutter something to herself and then starts right back up again. I don't even think she realizes she's doing it. She's done this for all her life as far as I know, and I think in the last few years it's started to get on my father's very last nerve. He has to leave the room after awhile. So she's over here with us in our office and is humming to beat the band with no one to fuss at her. It makes it easier to find her in the house, like a cat with a bell on its collar.

It's one of those things I will miss about her one day. So while she's been working and humming, I've been rummaging for my portable recording equipment to capture it all. At some point hopefully many years from now I'll be able to just loop this track and it will be like she's right here in the room with us all over again.

Mom humming (1:21)

Will trade mix tapes for running advice

I'm not a strong runner. I would really like to be, but if I run for more than 2 minutes I feel (and look) like someone is stabbing me in the side while I'm chased by a bear. At one point, I told myself if I just had music to motivate me, I could get out there and do something great. Needless to say, I still suck at running, but I've gotten pretty good at making running mixes. First, some recommended tools. I used Mix Meister's BPM Analyzer to sort through my iTunes library and set all the beats per minute. Once they're set, you can display and sort by that in your list of music. Another handy tool, if you just want to do it yourself is this fun web site that lets you tap out the BPM yourself and you can enter the value yourself in the Get Info section of each song. There are plenty of other options available on this BPM detection page.

Googling around, I found a lot of sites where folks said they ran at around 180 BPM, sometimes for over an hour. I don't know what these people are made of or if they all have tiny legs but that pace would kill. me. dead. Of course, your mileage may (literally) vary.

In this experimental play list, I tried to keep it to 30 minutes, have one warm up song and one crawl back home cool down song, with the other songs increasing in BPM overall. If you can make it through Fishbone (and it's breakneck 183 BPM) at the end, you're a better athlete than I. My legs hurt just thinking about it.

My First Jogging Experiment

As a note, I made the above mix using OpenTape, the free, open-source tool based off of MuxTape. In addition to this being a jogging experiment, it was a bit of a OpenTape experiment. I call it a success!

Two spaces after a period?

Do any of you still type two spaces after a period? I learned to type on a typewriter as a kid and that was the style at the time (insert Grandpa Simpson voice here). This entire entry, in fact, I'll type two spaces after each period. The first time I've been comfortable with one space after a period was once I started using Twitter, because I needed all the space I could get to squeeze my message into 140 characters. And the iPhone will automatically put a period at the end of your sentence if you type two spaces in a row (which then converts it to a period and a space).

But in all my typing I'm always putting two spaces after my periods. I've noticed that I can now figure out which copy is mine on our company website, just by looking at the spacing in the html file and finding double spaces after the periods. So apparently I'm the only one at the office who types that way.

Most web browsers will only render a single space after the period. But if you're looking at the raw text, I find it easier to read with that extra space at the end. I've cruised around online and found people who feel strongly in both directions. I'm just not sure if it's worth it to retrain my thumb after all these years.

So what about you? Do you type one or two spaces after a sentence? Do you hate reading documents that do whichever you don't do?